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Information Management: The Organizational Dimension - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 2001 by John L. Kmetz

Michael J. Earl, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 514 Pp. $35.00, paper.

This book, a sequel to the editor's earlier volume (Earl, 1988), is a welcome addition to the literature of organization theory (OT), information systems (IS), and information technology (IT). It is also useful for students of international business. Given the increasing impact that IT has had on business in a relatively short period of time and the rate of change of that technology, it is difficult to assess the impact that IS and IT have had on business organizations. It is equally challenging to assess the influence of organizational factors on the integration of these technologies into existing, often complex systems. This book addresses these relationships, principally from the perspective of the business organization, and does it very well.

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Like its predecessor, this book was generated in part by an annual conference that hosts both IS managers and academics, this one held in 1995 at the Oxford Institute of Management and sponsored by PA Consulting Group. Some of the papers in the book were presented at the conference, and others were invited. Given the nature of the conference and its participants, the editor's objectives were to provide guidance to IS researchers and scholars and to managers and IS professionals who have to grapple with questions of IS structure and applications in the field. With those dual objectives, the research draws heavily on case studies of companies, most based in the U.K. or Europe, although U.S. firms are also subjects in several of the papers. In my view, the results are very effective in meeting the editor's objectives, since they present a wealth of grounded data, frequently obtained over time or through multiple waves of measurement, and from a number of industrial and public-sector organizations. Collectively, the book provides a wealth of insights into the management and organization of IS, and the authors provide numerous models; the combination is a rich source of testable research propositions for scholars and applicable checklists for managers.

The 24 papers are a combination of conceptual works and empirical research, the majority of them a combination of the two. They are organized into five sections, each around a particular theme. The first section builds a conceptual model of relationships between IT and OT and then examines two major organizational applications of IT, groupware and business process reengineering, and two more general current issues, knowledge management and IS in global business. Section 2 is an update and extension of the strategic role of IS, which was the focus of the 1988 volume. Section 3 is a well-focused collection of papers concerned with not only the organization of IS within the firm but also dealing with outsourcing and extraorganizational relationships and the impact of mergers on IT integration. Section 4 focuses on IT projects and contains some very useful general findings and observations on project management. Section 5 principally concerns how IT and IS services are acquired and how IT and IS professionals fit into the organization. The last paper (by the editor) proposes a rich conceptual model of IT integration, the organization-fit framework.

The research primarily consists of qualitative case studies, with data collected through structured interviews and questionnaires in most instances. There is very limited quantitative measurement; data analysis is restricted to first-order correlations, and these appear in only two of the papers. But many of the research papers are based on multiple data collections and observations of organizations over time and, so, offer much greater insights into the dynamic processes of the IS function and its effects on organizations. This is especially true in section 3, which has some excellent insights into changes in organization structures to accommodate IT and the IS function. Like Earl, I agree that organizations can be conceptualized as "systems or structures of communication and information processing" (p. iii). When placed in the context of the conceptual models in the chapters and integrated with OT and concepts from other sources, the research makes a major contribution toward development of theory in a fiel d that is often perceived as atheoretical.

The papers are all written clearly and have been edited to have a "single voice." I find this stylistic consistency helpful in reading a collection, since it helps to follow different authors, and Earl and his contributors have done a very good job of this. The papers are also largely self-contained, making them easily accessible to specialized scholars, as readers need not read the entire volume preceding a chapter in order to understand it. This is accomplished at the cost of perhaps 10 to 15 percent greater length for the volume as a whole, but I think the tradeoff is a good choice.

I have one significant complaint about the book: the volume deserves a better subject index than it has. Virtually every page of my review copy contains notes to text subjects or acronyms that are incomplete or missing from the index. The most common omission is that of terms appearing in a paper other than the primary one that deals with the topic. The term "champion" is an example: "champion" itself is not in the index, although "project champion" is, and there are numerous references to the latter (this list, however, excludes several page references I consider to be important). As another example, "teams" are discussed as important contributors to many processes, but the word does not appear in the index. For the scholar or manager who is new to the field or who wants to make a thorough search of the volume, this is a serious omission and reduces the information value of the book. It appears that the individual papers were indexed relatively well, but a final master index for the volume was not prepared a s thoroughly. I would recommend that Earl or Oxford make such a master index and publish it on Oxford's Web page.

Business Services Industry

Information Management: The Organizational Dimension - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 2001 by John L. Kmetz

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